Mountain Lion Developer Preview Version 4 Released

The MacBook refresh and iOS 6 were hot topics at this year’s WWDC keynote event however news also came of OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 4 being made available to the Mac Developer Community. Similar to the iOS 6 Beta 1 release unless you are a registered developer you won’t be able to download and install the latest beta software legitimately.

Don’t get too downbeat if you can’t access the platform, it’s not far from completion with the retail version expected in July 2012 for the cracking price of $20. (Expect Â£21 in the UK similar to how OS X Lion was priced). Once again, you should be able to install the software on up to 10 devices (that you own) making the upgrade real value for money (I’d pay that per seat anyway having been used to Microsoft licensing!).

Apple do consider the latest release to be stable. It has iCloud deeply integrated into the system and much of Apple working its eco system in a progressive and unified way, an example of this being Apple ditching iChat and replacing it with Messages (which you can download in beta on Lion). Messages can then sync between devices as can Safari tabs in Safari 6 – the focus being keeping your data and preferences standard across the board.

Many of the popular iOS applications have been integrated into Mountain Lion (which also sync via iCloud) further building a solid bridge between the Mac OS and iOS. Examples of these are Notes, Reminders and the formidable Notification Centre. Further to this, both in a popular and unpopular move, Mountain Lion will heavily integrate social sharing through services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Vimeo.

Personally we can’t wait for this inexpensive, but still monumental, upgrade. How about you?

If you aren’t sure if your device will support Mountain Lion then we’ve made our best guess here about supported hardware.